Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Sibling Rivalry

Those of you who know my brother and sister-in-law or follow their blog know that I will be getting my first niece in a few short weeks! I'm so happy for them to become parents! Raising Jonah has been a huge challenge and life adjustment, but the rewards far outweigh any negatives.

For the most part while we were growing up, Andy and I avoided much of the traditional sibling rivalry. Swimming was about the only activity that we did in common and age group racing meant we rarely competed directly. Just to be clear, I had way more and an all around better selection of He-Man action figures than Andy. Not like it was a competition or anything, but I also always caught bigger fish too. No one kept track but I could jump my motorcycle 2 foot 6 and 3/4 inches farther than my brother. Give or take 1/8 of an inch.

I provide you, gentle reader, with all of this background information just to provide the necessary context to my next announcement:

Cara and I are expecting a new baby in early June!

We waited until Thanksgiving to tell family. Cara beat me to the social networking punch and let the Facebook world know soon after, so I am playing catch-up. Cara has also been archiving blog posts and just innundated everyone's feed readers. You can catch up on her side of the story on her blog.

Jonah seems to be taking everything in stride so far. When we told him for the first time, he just said, "Oh, Thanks." We have a big brother book that he likes and when friends asked him what he wanted for Christmas over the weekend, he said "presents for my baby sister." He is dead-set on the baby being a sister, but we won't know for a couple weeks yet.

So again, I'm sure no one is keeping track of these things, but let's review. Chris = 1 kid + 1 forthcoming. Andy = 1 kid forthcoming. I score this kind of like horseshoes. Jonah is a ringer and new baby counts as in the pit and close enough to the stake to score. Bottom line? Andy is sooo getting smoked in the baby game. (If they've been secretly hiding twins to gain a strategic advantage I'm gonna be pissed.)